Thursday, February 27, 2014

I need to vent a bit. I've been a practicing Pagan for 50 years now having studied in India as a teenager. I've been involved in Pagan community for about 45 years being a community leader and out Pagan spokesperson when it was dangereous to do so in central Ohio back in the mid seventies. I founded a unique, scholarly researched historic reclaiming of what was the most prominent Pagan religion of Rome that was subjected to wholesale erasure from history by the catholic church.

We built an actual Pagan infrastructure dedicated to charitable works and community service. Throughout all that the "movers and shakers" in Paganism have almost totally ignored us. Multiple contacts with COG totally ignored. Our legal battle, covered multiple times in the large Pagan blogs and even written up in the New York freakin' Times and one of only TWO major legal battles in the past decade ignored by the Pagan legal crowd despite our reaching out multiple times. One self styled Pagan legal "scholar" did us actual, real world harm with a badly researched article about our initial loss after out and out refusing my offer of background material. Raising the money for the winning appeal became almost impossible as a result.

I've tried to avoid anything that remotely looked like a witch war but I am sick and tired on being silent about the relentless self promoting "leaders" of Paganism who are all self promotion and no action. I'm sick and tired of watching our path being written out of Paganism by Wicca style Pagans who seem to think they own the word Pagan when arguably we have a much better claim to that label historically. We won a major legal victory for minority religions in general but when it looked like we lost, that was all over the place and the final victory ignored by the greater Pagan community.

All to often Wiccans dismiss us as some sort of Dianics. Dianics don't like us because we are open to all genders. Others dislike that we have reclaimed the original monotheistic Mother Goddess tradition. Others freak out that we are supportive of LGB causes. Sometimes I think we should just ignore the rest of the Pagan community and just do our thing. Ok, venting over, thanks for reading this far.